In whatever form they take, eating and breathing are functional necessities of life. They engage human bodies in fundamental material exchanges with their environment and the other beings in it. Matters of metabolism offer a useful topic in the post-humanities, drawing attention to usually overlooked aspects of living systems’ relationality. Paying attention to metabolism can offer many examples of both embeddedness and co-constitution that suggest how we might reconceptualize the human from an ecological perspective. Looking at the acts of eating and breathing shows the vital engagement of individual living beings in material exchanges that span scales from molecular to global.
Annemarie Mol’s Eating in Theory is one of a number of recent publications that make use of the insights offered by attention to metabolism (another is Desiree Förster’s Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes, reviewed next month). Here eating offers a way to revisit and critique aspects of humanist...